"sicklittlemonkey"  wrote:

>The 116+ million yearly visitors to Disney theme parks don't share this 
>lack of enthusiasm. That's where the real money is with Mickey Mouse & co.

>And you may not realise how big it is in other countries, like Japan. I 
>have a Disney bank book around here somewhere.

I don't know about Japan but in July 2004,  my wife and I, her 2 grown 
daughters, 1 with her husband and 1 with a friend (6 of us) flew to Disney 
World  from here in Canada and stayed at Coronado Springs Hotel for 2 weeks.

Only 2 days were spent outside of Disney World; the day we rented a limo and 
went to MGM and the day we hopped-in a taxi to go to the Kissimmee 
Courthouse to get married. (We were not married when we left Canada). The 
ring we used for the ceremony was Mickey Mouse costume jewelry from the 
Disney Giftshop at the Hotel (and has since been substituted with matching 
plain gold bands).

My wife and her kids, (and her previous husband before she was widowed) made 
a point of visiting Disney World every few years (in addition to England and 
Greece).

As for my own kids from my first marriage, I could never afford it. They 
grew-up despite that. My younger sister went with my mother long after I had 
left home. But back then it was considered quite an extravagence here in 
Canada. Keep in mind that I left home to make my way as a man in the '60's.

Interestingly though when I was between wives about 8 years back I was with 
a single mum with 2 teenage kids. Despite the fact that she had a hard time 
making ends meet, she considered her kids deprived (and so did they) because 
they had not yet been to Disney World or Disney Land. I did not stay in 
touch so don't know how that turned out.

OTOH I'd rather go Disney than Vegas *BUT* I much prefer the vacations that 
my wife and I have enjoyed in England and in Italy since '04. Visiting 
Stonhenge and wandering through Pompeii seems less Mickey Mouse:)

Keep in mind too, that in the '50's while growing-up in Winnipeg I regularly 
watched The Mickey Mouse Club with Annette, Roy, Jimmy, etc. and every 
Sunday watched Walt Disney religiously. Davy Crocket was another favorite 
show here a little later, early '60's.

And at one point during the early 90's I wrote part of the Point-Of-Sale 
system used by Disney Stores (it was written in Canada), and of course we 
have Disney Stores in our Malls here too.

However, the golden age of Mickey Mouse was in those old black and white 
politically incorrect cartoons that my Dad watched when he was a kid, along 
with The Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. I 
watched all of them too.

For purposes of the original ancient intent of Copyright, Mickey's Copyright 
should have run-out since Walt isn't around anymore. However as an exclusive 
TradeMark and like a Certificate of Authenticity even I would defend 
Disney's right to protect Mickey forever.

Mickey was never abandoned.

And if you listen to some of Walt Disney's narratives on his life and how he 
dreamed-up and worked-on projects, he hardly wanted to deprive anyone of 
Mickey, no more so than Microsoft wants to deprive anyone of Windows.

All this talk of spending $200.00 per year to maintain a copyright sounds 
like laisse-faire crap to me, and has no place in the world of artists and 
authors.

Software shouldn't be covered by Copyright anyway but we're stuck with that 
now.

Since special rules targetted at protecting Software through Copyright are 
applied, and since Corporations have the distinction of possibly living 
forever and transferring Copyrighted assets to other corporations some rules 
need to apply here.

Assuming a Copyrighted asset can be depreciated or disappear from the books 
of a corporation altogether:

I would argue:

1. That corporations that hold Copyrights must publicly declare the value of 
those assets and that the value must be able to be challenged by anyone 
world-wide. That value if changed and appreciated must result in a capital 
gain and the loss can be applied as well. This is fair if you consider that 
up to now this has been found money for the raiders and a CCA depreciation 
might prove effective in keeping a smaller company afloat. Let your business 
mind imagine how this could be used to prevent old software from being worth 
anything before grubby takeovers occur.

That asset value would be balanced against profits and other factors to be 
used to determine maximum awards in Copyright infringement suits.

Also the taxman could insititute a charitable donation for Copyrights be 
transferred to public domain. This could be a personal incentive as well and 
could be argued as typical Canadian Social-Democratic tactic. The Anointed 
One in the US might like this too:)

2. Any Software not declared is not considered Copyrighted and is 
sutomatically in the public domain.

There. That should do it:)

Something like the following would also be good:

1. All Software must be placed into the Public Domain immediately upon 
withdrawing sales and support. No exceptions.

2. In order to be considered a copyrighted work, all Software in uncrippled 
condition must be placed in a government archive to be made immediately 
available to all when placed into the Public Domain upon expiration of 
Copyright.

There. That should also do it:)

Keep in mind that Copyright is originally intended for publicly marketed 
works of Art and Literature.

This balances the rights of marketplace ownership with the rights of the 
public to access technology. Copyright was not intended to protect 
technology. That was what patents were for.

Someone said that I was confused about patents and Copyright. It is not I 
who is confused but it is the law that has been skewed to confuse those who 
would confuse others including politicians and judges. Perhaps fortunatley, 
the US congress's lack of intelligence and other confused stupidity in not 
acting and cleaning-up a domestic mess that has recently nearly bankrupted 
the world will no doubt have severe repercussions in following US standards 
at all in the rest of the world going forward, including Copyright, so it 
really doesn't matter so-much what goes-on in the US anymore anyway, and 
this trend will continue as Rome burns.

Now what I said about Software does not make sense when it comes to 
Aboriginal Art... or does it? Are the politicians giving away more of our 
rights or are they protecting the rights of disenfranchised minorities and 
third-world and vanished or endangered cultures?

http://www.inuitart.org/content.aro?pageid=317

Some will be very surprised at where this will end. It will not. My last 4 
years spent writing the supply chain systems for Canada's Arctic Communities 
have also seen me writing the Art and Appraisal systems for the transfer of 
this art to the galleries, etc. I do a severe amount of business analysis as 
well as the necessary software development and integration. I see it.

Some other challenges to Copyright will be whether the software is available 
in an official language.

See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut

Already what matters in the US means very little in the wake of tomorrow 
since a marketplace here and elsewhere that requires a value for loss, also 
requires publicly offered Software to be available in official languages to 
be actively legally offered for sale in some regions. It has no commercial 
value otherwise.

At which point the US may wish to do as the Chinese once did and restrict 
the Internet to domestic sites to try to prevent downloads from regions of 
foreign lands where Mickey Mouse means nothing but Mickey Inunnguaq may be 
used freely as a culturally appropriate verbatim copy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inunnguaq

Having reached some new abrasive height of points for debate...

Cheers Eh,

Bill
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